Blue Planet Journey

  Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. Hanauma Bay consistently is rated one of the top tourist destinations on Oahu. In 1999, the family began a 13 month sojourn in Honolulu. I had started my first sabbatical at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, as a visiting faculty member in the Botany Department. My host was David Duffy, then the director of the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit. The mission of the PCRU is to "...protect and restore Hawaii's native species, ecosystems, and cultural resources." As a family, we were visiting Hanauma Bay about every other week. The Bay is a city park, but a state Marine Protected Area. In 1999, admission was free, but you had to pass a gauntlet of signs reminding visitors to avoid standing on the reef, don't feed the fish, and be safe. On the beach, there was a blue tarp stretched between four coconut trees, with tables and volunteers. I still remember volunteers Larry and Bob, staffing these tables and leading schedu...

  Visiting an alien planet... I don't know how else to describe the experience of exploring underwater. "Alien" can be defined as "coming from another world." To a terrestrial, air-breathing, homeothermic bipedal hominin , being underwater can only seem like being, well, on a different planet. There's a reason astronauts train in a pool to experience " neutral-buoyancy" diving to simulate the weightlessness of space travel. And creatures have been evolving in Earth's seas for a LONG time. Complex life appeared in the Earth's history about a half billion years ago. "The basic body plans of all modern animals were set during the Cambrian Period, 542 - 488 million years ago." Since then, species have come and gone (mostly gone), but if you visit a thriving reef environment, you won't even think about what has disappeared, because there is just so much still there! This week we (Caroline, Wes and Mignon) went on a dive trip in t...